The full moon hangs high in the sky, illuminating all of Denocte with its ethereal glow. Morrighan looks up and feels thankful to see it again and not the never ending sunlight. It had been a trying summer indeed, but now the world seems to be back in balance, at least as far as the day and night cycles go. And yet, her insomnia still remains, so she's decided to wander out for a brief night patrol.
For the most part, it's quiet. The hustle and bustle of the markets can faintly be heard in the distance, but otherwise there is just the gentle night breeze. The tall grass sways back and forth as the air flows through. Morrighan finds herself feeling content, even for just a moment. As the festivities started to wind down, she had been more tense to ensure the borders stayed secure. Perhaps she is overdoing it, but she feels one can never be too careful. Tonight, though, there is a small moment where she's relaxed.
A wolf's howl breaks the silence to the north and the grullo mare's ears twitch. Most likely it's Bram on one of his nightly hunts, but either way she's annoyed at the disturbance. She cannot see the creature anywhere nearby, so it's likely hidden among the trees or cliffs. She doesn't feel like chasing after it, so she remains where she is with a scowl on her face.
Morrighan heads up the hills for a better vantage point and turns around to look down at the Court. The lights from the Court's keep and the markets twinkle, but it's the maze below that really captures her attention. There is something shiny about it in the moonlight and she can't recall it being like this before. Taking one last look around, she decides to take a patrol break and investigate.
When she comes upon the maze, it's clear that it's no longer made of corn stalks. Instead they're long-stemmed plants made of metal. The shine is from the material and it's hard and cold to the touch. Her eyes narrow from confusion as she tries to figure out who, or what, did this. Another good question is why.
Morrighan enters the maze, although with its new material, it seems slightly destroyed. There is a hole with a bed of rubies and diamonds scattered on the ground. They make uncomfortable crunching noises as her hooves step over them. The changes seem very elaborate, so it must have been by some way of magic.
Isra. The thought sparks in her mind like a flame and it all comes together. She remembers the night in the markets when the Queen changed the ground beneath them from stone to wood. It seemed like a dream, but it was the woman's incredible ability.
It had to be her, but why? What did Isra have against a silly corn maze for a fall festival?
@Sirius so I'm referencing what Isra's done to the maze after meeting Orestes here, cause I thought it'd be a little more interesting. Hope you don't mind! And Morr is super confused lmao.
Sirius is no stranger to walking the night alone. The darkness has never bothered him, not when so much of his life has been spent embraced by it. It’s become a nightly habit of his, to break away from the light and the noise of the Court. To leave the brightness of the bonfires behind in search of a dark sky.
In truth it was not the darkness he looked for - it was the stars.
They shine down on him now, a million and one witnesses as he crosses the Sideralis. The bright-white-moon-that-is-full is drowning some of them out, bathing the prairie grasses in a silver so profound it almost hurts to look at, hiding the distant galaxies from him.
But Sirius has never needed to see the stars to know that they are there. He fills in the gaps in the night sky with his imagination, painting in all of the missing stars from memory.
He’s been to the festival-maze-game before, but tonight it’s different. The corn is singing to him when he walks the beaten pathway in a tone he has not heard before, and when he looks closely he realizes that it’s not corn at all, not anymore. In its place is something cold and firm and golden. And Sirius has no words to explain what has happened here, how one thing could so easily become another, or what sort of magic has ever wrought such a change. But he continues to follow the trail weaving between the tall stemmed plants, as if there’s a part of him that already knows there are more changes to be found here tonight.
The stars are starting to laugh when the ground turns to rubies beneath his hooves, and Sirius wonders if they know what happened here, if they had been witnesses to the transformation. Would they tell him, if he asked? He thinks they might, but some things he wants to learn for himself.
And so he walks. While the stars laugh overhead and the rubies crunch underhoof, he walks, following the path that twists and turns and sometimes ends.
And when he sees the mare standing in the middle of it all, all quicksilver and ivory, he thinks for a moment that she, too, must be a part of the magic thrumming in the soil.
“Hello?”
His voice is quiet, nearly a whisper. He takes another step closer, diamonds clinking against his hooves.
“Sirius am I. You are who?”
hearts are breaking
wars are raging on
you’ve got me nervous
i’m at the end of my rope
hey, man, we can’t all be like you
i wish we were all rose-colored too
my rose-colored boy
Morrighan turns in a slow circle looking up at the metal stalks. They tower above her with a menacing gleam and the soft breeze makes them clink together eerily. It's too unnatural. It has to be Isra- it's the only explanation.
Suddenly, she can hear the sound of hooves crunching the rubies. She turns and sees the figure of another about the same height as her. He has large wings and a long braided tail, but he is not anyone she's met before. Given these festivities, he could be from anywhere.
When Sirius speaks, she is a bit confused by the way he talks. Not so much by his voice, but by how he arranges his words.
"I'm Morrighan, the Warden of Night Court," she states, always as proud as ever to wear the title. "You are?" The grullo mare studies him and wonders what his intentions are for being here. He seems relatively harmless, so perhaps it's the same reason they all enter the maze- to explore.
"I'm not sure what happened here, it wasn't like this before," she says, gazing back up at the once-corn stalks. "But I'm going to find out, feel free to follow if you want."
And with that, she flicks her tail and turns down another path stretching to the right. Morrighan isn't sure how well she could do at mazes, but it may not actually be a bad idea to pair up. From the talks, there's supposed to be a beautiful garden at the heart of the maze. With the way it's changed, she's curious how it might look now.
The starlight and the darkness turn her grey, dark-grey-splashed-with-lighter-grey and eyes that are sharp, voice that is flat. She studies him the same way that he studies her, and Sirius almost doesn’t notice the way she seems to look through him, suspicion creating an edge along her face,
He blinks. And for a heartbeat too long, he is silent. Above them he can hear the stars whispering over them, filling in all the gaps between their words, too quiet for him to make out. But their meaning is clear nonetheless.
“Sirius,” he echoes, as if he has not already told her. His eyes are moon-bright as he looks at her, far too solemn for the boyish tremors in his voice. “I am Sirius.” This time he gets the order of the words right - but they still taste wrong on his tongue, a foreign language that he doesn’t yet understand.
The boy follows after her silently, taking the pathway that opens up to their right. The rubies and diamonds are sharp beneath them, digging into the undersides of his hooves. His wings itch, flaring to either side of him; the sky is tempting, and for a moment he wonders how all these gemstones and cold, once-corn-not-metal-stalks might look from above.
But Sirius has never been to the center of the maze before - and he knows flying would only ruin the surprise of the maze.
For a while he tries to be quiet. There’s something about the mare that demands it, even without her requesting it. And for the first few steps, he succeeds.
But the stars grow louder and louder, unbearably so, their questions drumming a beat for themselves across the inside of his skull, until he can’t contain them to himself any longer -
“Is this-“ he searches for the right word, as he grazes his muzzle along the side of a long-stemmed plant. It bends beneath his touch, shivering under the moonlight, cool and smooth and lovely. “-Magic?” The vowels are all wrong, too high and too low so that they sound like a different word entirely (my-geek?).
hearts are breaking
wars are raging on
you’ve got me nervous
i’m at the end of my rope
hey, man, we can’t all be like you
i wish we were all rose-colored too
my rose-colored boy
Her question seems to go over his head when he repeats his name rather than stating his title like she did. Morrighan isn't sure what she's gotten herself into, but her patience is starting to wear thin. Apparently she will have to craft her words differently for them to fully register in this man's brain.
"What Court do you belong to, Sirius? What rank?" she asks, her tone a bit short. The sound of their hooves echo off all the metal looming above them as they travel further into the maze. There are shards everywhere crunching underneath each step. The stalks almost seem like they could fall on them at any minute and cut their flesh open with their sharp points. If this had been Isra, she must've been truly angry at something. Part of her admires the woman's work here even if she ruined the festival's attraction.
As they get deeper, there are many dead ends. With each wrong turn, there is a disgruntled noise that comes out of Morr's mouth and flames that suddenly appear at her hooves. The stars shine above them, twinkling almost as if to laugh down on them for being lost. This is one of the few times she wishes she has wings and her eyes drift over to Sirius. She wonders if he would understand an order to fly ahead and direct her where to go. For now, she holds back and feels determined to figure it out on her own.
The man's pace has slowed as he takes a moment to gaze at one of the metal stalks. He asks his question in such a strange way that it takes her a second to realize what he said. Maybe he isn't all there.
"Magic," she corrects him. "Yes, probably by Isra, for some godforsaken reason." She doesn't spend much more time lingering about the metal stalks. She's seen endless rows of them and the sharp points of the rubies were hurting her feet. They needed to focus on the task at hand- getting to the center of the maze where maybe, just maybe, more answers could be found.
And it feels like ages have passed and Morr's grown several gray hairs, but they make it to the center at last. It's nothing like the festival-goers described either, not after the "my-geek" touched it. It's the ruins of what used to be a garden. The rows of corn stalks-turned-metal curl inward down into the center where they all want to come together at a point. However there is a decent gap, about the size of a horse. Definitely Isra.
"She was pissed. No idea why, but she left a mess," the Warden says, her voice low, probably more to herself than Sirius.
When she turns to the man again, she squints her eyes, more out of curiosity than suspicion. "What, have you never seen magic before?" She can't imagine someone could go about life on this land and never experience it. It's everywhere- equines wielding great power, a random island erupting out of nothing from the sea, the universe stopping the sun from setting for nearly a whole season (fuck that noise). They would have to be truly oblivious and, the longer she spends with him, the more that seems like a possibility.
He looks at her, and considers how many stars he might fit in the space between their breaths. More than he might dare to count - an entire galaxy is waiting for him to breathe it into life, stardust crinkling across his body like an extra skin. The whole of the universe might be separating the two horses, so violent and vast does the distance between them feel.
A part of him wonders at the sharpness of her tone - but the rest of him, the parts of him that are lost in the stars and the moon and the wonder of the maze doesn’t care.
”Denocte,” he tells her, and for all that distance in between them he wants to tell her that they are the same. But the words do not come - they never do, not for him, not the way the stars did. So instead he meets her gaze, silver on brown and blue, and all of them look chrome in the moonlight. ”And wish I be here a soldier.”
He walks along her quietly, and he listens quietly, but there’s nothing quiet in the way the stars begin to cling to him, and the way the white across his skin lights up like comets. He walks around the center of the maze, and his magic is reaching, reaching, reaching, like it wants to consume the last of the magic that Isra left here, like it, too, wants to create.
”Seen magic have I.” The word still tastes foreign on his tongue. But he has never needed to know a name to recognize the face, and today is no different. ”And stars, and anger too.” He has never been angry enough to change a cornstalk into sheet metal, or pebbles into rubies with edges sharp enough to draw blood. But his stars are roiling at the sight of it all, and while they do not make the constellation he wants them to they crackle like miniature suns and meteors racing through the night.
There’s something almost-sharp in his gaze as he looks back at her. ”And seen enough have I to know this is no mess.”
When Sirius had said he wished to be a soldier, Morrighan almost didn't believe him. For one, she's never seen him before and also he seems too spacey to be a proper soldier. She's not sure if he's new to Denocte or not but he would not last very long on a true battlefield. Right now might not be the appropriate time to tell him, so she just hopes he never gets that far (for all their sakes).
Then he says that he has seen magic and perhaps he's not as spacey as she initially thought. It's the way he observes this chaos and is confident in what he sees. He has seen anger and can tell this is all not a mess, but she disagrees. It used to be a cornstalk but has since been transformed and partially destroyed. Though, the way it curls in is more of an intention compared to the ruby shards that were just thrown around back there. Something more had happened.
"What do you think this is then?" she asks, her tone still showing the little patience she has (if she ever had any in the first place). If Sirius seems to know so much, she'd like him to enlighten her. "What was she trying to do?"
It's unclear if Isra tried to do this to herself or to someone else. Given how there's no real blood stains or any bodies, it very well may have been towards herself. But why?
All that comes to mind is the very reason she looks up at the stars and invisible gods and screams. There's never any response back, yet there is still turmoil. As if they are looking down, but they just don't care and have a good laugh. If Bram were here, she'd give him a cold glare.
"I don't even know what to do with this place now," she adds, turning her body around to take in the full scope of the scenery again. Like hell this isn't a mess. "It's not exactly a festival attraction anymore." Maybe it still could be, but not in the way they had intended. This place may as well just be a maze of nightmares to scare the little kids.
He can see the disbelief in her eyes - the hard-edged way she glances at him from the corner of one eye, as if he’s not worth a proper glance. Maybe, in another life, he might have cared. Perhaps he would have looked at her and felt something other than indifference for her dislike of him.
But Sirius has only ever known people who looked at him with less than disgust, and the sharp sting of his whips when he displeased them.
So he says nothing.
Instead he only watches her with his silver eyes bright and wide, staring at her back even when she turns away and seemingly tries to forget he exists. And as much as his wings begin to itch, and as his magic blinks sleepily awake inside of him, reacting with the magic that lingers still in the maze, he resists the urge to fly far, far away. Star dust is curling through the air like smoke, pressing hungrily in against the darkness of his skin. A comet flashes, white-hot and brilliant, before it is gone in an instant. And in that instant, Sirius thinks he knows how it feels to burn like a star.
He doesn’t answer the first of her questions; because he can’t find the words, because he doesn’t know what the Queen had felt, because he would rather speak the language of the stars than the language of Novus. He only drifts like someone lost around the center of the maze, listening to the crunch of the gemstones underhoof and the music the wind makes as it flows between sheets of metal.
“Do nothing, think I,” his voice is barely more than a whisper, fading even as the miniature galaxy he’s made begins to grow. It struggles, the stars throbbing in time with his heart beat, as if the frenzy of his blood is flowing directly into his magic. A wing takes shape for a second, fluttering once, twice, before it dissipates. The point of a sword - or is it a unicorn’s horn? - takes its place, rising to stab towards the sky before, it, too, fractures into a thousand tiny stars. An arrow shoots through the space separating them, but it breaks apart into dust before it reaches for Morrighan’s own heart.
“Better this way.”
The magic calls to him still, setting his blood aflame so that all his skin seems to tingle and itch. His limbs are trembling, and the stars are clustered so tightly around his form they seem to consume him. So Sirius lifts his eyes to Morrighan’s, not caring if she meets his gaze or not; there’s something quiet in his stare, something almost-solemn, as he pities her for being able to look on a scene wrought from passion and see it as nothing more than a “mess”.
He breathes in the magic of the maze; exhales stardust. A dozen paths reach outward from the center of the maze, and Sirius turns towards one without caring where it might take him. “Meet you nice it was, Morrighan, Warden of Night Court.” And then he’s gone, running between the long-stemmed metal and corn, feeling like the stardust in him, too, is all but ready to explode.
The man breaks her concentration when he speaks again. At first, Morrighan is annoyed, but then she realizes that she actually has no idea what he's talking about. Do nothing? Does he mean just leave this place alone and let it fall apart?
Before she can ask him, he conjures stardust between them. He seems very focused while Morrighan just watches him in confusion. Instead of doing anything productive, apparently he would just rather make star puppets. Even better, an imaginary arrow shoots forward but falls apart before it can reach her chest. If this had been anyone else, she'd take that as a threat, but he seemed too dumb to mean something like that. Instead, she just looks at him with narrowed eyes.
Do nothing, it's better this way?
She's about to ask what's wrong with him, but he's already leaving and taking his stardust with him.
"What a weirdo," is all she says under her breath before turning to leave on her own path. Morrighan hopes she never runs into him again or she may not be able to control her patience that well a second time.
@Sirius aaand closer! I love him, even if Morr doesn't <3
